take control of the house, when they have many more seats in the senate. and that s, in many ways, what this is about. and we ve obviously been talking about president obama, but the person we also should be talking about is harry reid, who is the senate majority leader. he is somebody who has had trouble, a lot of trouble, getting republicans on board with some things, but he realized, just as the white house did, it s now or never on the don t ask, don t tell bill. it was maybe now or never on the s.t.a.r.t. treaty in terms of just the basic numbers that democrats had. and that combined with the calendar, the fact that they really pushed and made clear to republicans, we mean it, we re going to do it, and that helped to bring republicans on board. and he did express a lot of frustration, and deep disappointment, david gergen, that he could not get the congress to approve what was called the dream act, that would allow young children whose parents came here illegally to serve in the
you don t. we re constantly working to help our nation leaf up to its promise. we re always moving toward a more perfect union. today we move one step closer to the more perfect union. we re going to hear now from joe lieberman, who has been terrific in this regard. i have to acknowledge, even though he may not speak is chairman carl levin. as chairman he s the reason we had don t ask, don t tell bill. everyone knows, had he not done that we would not be here today. joe lieberman, i appreciate very much that his advocacy in helping us bring those few republicans in. i appreciate those few republicans. we could not have done it without them. they are brave in doing so with the pressure that they have
going to go ahead with start after they get the tax vote and the spending bill out of the way. it seemed like they were preparing for this to go into next week. unfortunately. and so what you re saying is the timing would be this tax vote, start, then funding the government, so they would insert start in between that? before or after or even in the middle. but something like that. then they still want to get a vote on the immigration bill. they ve got the don t ask, don t tell bill. if they want to stay into next week, they ll have a lot of votes through the weekend and into early next week. and i don t want to play with you yes, you do. you re right. but this bill that senator harry reid is is championing, where is that going to get inserted? is that part of the tax bill? i don t think he ll put it in the tax bill. me may try to put it in the spending bill. i think he s going to have a difficult time getting that in anyway. however the ban on internet
mark whittaker, i think we jumped in on this conversation kind of halfway through. from what i ve been able to pull away from this is harry reid taking questions about senator lieberman and senator collins, which i believe is in reference to don t ask, don t tell because as we understand it this morning, there was private discussions between senator collins as well as senator reid and senator collins demanded that reid allow what s known as unlimited debate on the don t ask, don t tell bill in order for her to vote for repeal. really, that s just something that s going to run down the clock, isn t it? well, the reason for that is that the don t ask, don t tell repeal is embedded in the larger defense appropriations bill. nobody wants to see that not go through because the soldiers need to get funded. so there s a little bit of a game of chicken going on. senator collins has been leading the the negotiations on that. but i think this is really i think what they want to see, the pr
opponents to get enough time to debate some of these other provisions, but then allow the entire vote to go forward and keeping that provision in there, which would then lead to the end of don t ask, don t tell. but it seems like a furious end game is coming here, but there is so much at play right now. it doesn t seem like we have a directive of whether or not it s really going to come to the floor, do we? we don t. firstly, we have to find out whether or not there are 60 votes to prevent a filibuster. thomas, this is the way things get done in washington. they often get done at the last minute before everybody goes off on recess. so the fact that we re coming up against the clock is not unusual in this town. it doesn t mean i don t like it. all right. mark whittaker, thanks for helping walk us through this process. we ll talk again soon. economic distress is being felt in every state in the nation, but that didn t stop hard-hit alabama and 25 other states from protecting thei